The project I work on at AdRoll is mature. In a mature project the economics of software flip around to where doing something right is more desirable that doing something quickly. In 2015 we invested a lot of effort in resolving long-tail issues with the bidder system, issues we’d recognized in our ...

High Level Problem Our Dynamic Ads product is designed to show a user ads with specific, recommended products based on their browsing history. Each advertiser gives us a list of all of its products beforehand so that we can generate a “product catalog” for the advertiser. Sometimes, however, the pro...

In a blog post a couple weeks ago we talked about the developer tools we built for Rollup, our UI component library. One of those tools is responsible for automatically generating documentation for React components and we just released it as an open-source gulp plugin called gulp-react-docs. When we...

AdRoll uses large-scale machine learning to bid intelligently in internet advertising auctions. In this post, we explore some of the engineering behind the data pipelines that feed our learning algorithms, in particular our real-time system that constructs features from event streams. #Overview If y...

This is the third post in a series of three blog posts about Rollup, AdRoll’s UI component library. This post covers what we learned from building a UI component library. For details on why we built the UI component library see the first post in the series and for how we built it see the second post...

/**/ We have implemented a number of systems in support of our Erlang-based real-time bidding platform. One of these is a Celery task system which runs code implemented in Python on a set of worker instances running on Amazon EC2. With the recent announcement of built-in support for Python in AWS La...

This is the second in a series of three blog posts about Rollup, AdRoll’s UI component library. This post covers how we build individual components and the developer tools supporting them. For background on why we built a UI component library, see last week’s post. For a discussion on what we learne...

This is the first in a series of three blog posts about Rollup, AdRoll’s UI component library. This post covers how and why we built a component library. See the second post for details on the technical implementation, and the third post for a discussion of what we learned. The AdRoll Prospecting la...

AdRoll — Part I As a high school math teacher, I never imagined that I would become a software engineer, but here I am. After teaching and running a math tutoring business for five years, I began to yearn for a new challenge and started to tackle Codecademy’s Python course. By the end of the section...

This is the second article in a series that describes how we built AdRoll Prospecting. This time, we’ll talk about managing batch job dependencies. Batch processing and data pipeline coordination is one of the oldest application of computer systems. In late 1950s US Navy and NASA first started using...

This is the first article in a series that describes how we built a new data-intensive product, AdRoll Prospecting, using an architecture based on Docker containers. We organized a meetup about this topic with Pachyderm.io. You can watch a recording of our meetup talk here: and see the slides here: ...

The data science team at AdRoll is constantly working to improve our programmatic bidding algorithm, BidIQ. One recent improvement to BidIQ has been the introduction of a novel modeling technique called Factorization Machines (FM). The FM model allows us to consider interactions between all predicti...

I’ve always been interested in creating and improving our developer tools. Things like git hooks, browser extensions or command line scripts. When I work on such tools, one of my goals is to make them easy but also pleasant to use. “Pleasantness” typically comes in the form of being the least verbos...

It has been a long time outstanding, “to do item”, to start collecting feedback and net promoter scores from the tens of thousands of customers that AdRoll has. Once at scale, it becomes surprisingly challenging to ensure that feedback from users is sent to Product, Engineering and SMB teams. Last m...

Eight years ago, AdRoll was founded on this principle: to make display advertising work for everyone. As we’ve grown to six offices and over 25,000 advertisers worldwide, our challenge has been to make sure that we continue to identify and respond to the needs of businesses large and small. The Grow...

AdRoll’s real-time data pipeline drives many systems crucial to our business. These systems inform the decisions made by our real-time bidding infrastructure in response to the tens of billions of daily requests we receive from ad exchanges. They also refresh our predictive models, guard against ove...

Since June 2014, the AdRoll Engineering team has been hosting Tech Talks every other Tuesday – give or take – where members of our team share about a technology, project, or tool they’re excited about. We’ve been lucky enough to have a number of developers from within the larger SF / Bay Area commun...

AdRoll is building products that allow customers of any size, big or small, with a lot of marketing experience or none, to run high performing marketing campaigns. And with over 20,000 customers in over 150 countries, we’ve been fairly successful in this. Our main product has been Retargeting, the b...

We love Amazon Web Services here at AdRoll. All of our production, test, and staging infrastructure runs on AWS. Really, the only systems we operate outside of EC2 are developers’ laptops. Most of the time this isn’t an issue, as we use platform-agnostic tools like Python, Java and Erlang. When it c...

Originally published on the AdRoll Blog on November 12, 2014. The advertising industry has undeniably become a data play, as consumers are generating valuable data with every digital interaction. We hear buzzwords like “big data,” “machine learning” and “real-time algorithms,” but little about how t...

The D programming language has quickly become our language of choice on the Data Science team for any task that requires efficiency, and is now the keystone language for our critical infrastructure. Why? Because D has a lot to offer. A Brief Introduction One of the clearest advantages of using D com...

Read the post here: http://glossy.adroll.com/shiny_blogpost/

AirControl is a tool to control AirPlay Mirroring from the command line. TL;DR: it’s open source and available in our GitHub repo. If you’re interested in the details of how we got it working, read on. Once a month, the Engineering team has a Hack Day. Anybody can work on anything they like, be it d...

AdRoll’s customer dashboard is powered by our HBase cluster, populated using both Storm and Hadoop MapReduce. Using Storm allows us to provide real-time statistics to our users, while Hadoop gives us the accuracy guarantees needed for billing. Throughout the day, Storm emits a steady stream of write...

Earlier this week, AdRoll hosted a group of Hadoop users and developers for their monthly meetup. A member of our data team presented AdRoll’s infrastructure and described how we combine Hadoop with Storm and HBase to achieve both high accuracy and low latency. Here are the slides from that talk.

Continuing with our video posts, here is Valentino once again, this time presenting at the 2014 AWS Summit in San Francisco. Valentino discusses how to handle 50 billion requests per day without breaking the bank by optimizing our AWS operations. In addition to low cost, AWS allows AdRoll’s RTB infr...

Better late than never, but we wanted to share a video from last fall’s AWS re:Invent conference where our own chief architect Valentino Volonghi shared the stage with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels for a fireside chat. Valentino discusses AdRoll’s use of DynamoDB, one of the core technologies we leverage...

I recently came across JSCS and thought it would be a great addition to our git flow to enforce consistent code style for all of our JavaScript code. JSCS is a code style checker for JavaScript. It lets you decide if you prefer your if’s with or without a space after them; if you’re OK with declarin...

Speaking of Erlang and AdRoll… now is probably a good time to let you know AdRoll will be acting as a sponsor at the Erlang Factory SF Bay Area Conference this coming March. Our very own Brian Troutwine (@bltroutwine) will be giving a talk on the complex problems involved in live monitoring our real...

Welcome, friends, to the first AdRoll tech blog of 2014! Last night AdRoll hosted Erlounge here in our Mission street offices; seventeen Erlangers showed up and three talks were given. Juan Puig of Linden Labs gave a lightening tutorial on the use of quickcheck in Erlang, the slides of which you can...